Various means have been proposed to increase the security of closures, such as cabinet drawers and doors, against unauthorized opening movements, and/or to give clear visual indication of the occurrence of any such unauthorized movement.
In typical cabinets, such as may be defined by the desk pedestal or a separate filing cabinet employing closures in the form of sliding drawers and by storage cabinets employing closures in the form of swinging doors, it is conventional practice to provide the cabinet or its individual closures with built-in, key operated locks for security purposes. Drawbacks of typical cabinets involve the ease with which its key operated lock(s) may be tampered with in the absence of later observable signs of unauthorized entry and/or the difficulty with which persons, such as security personnel, may determine the locked/unlocked condition of the cabinet closures without manual inspection/manipulation. To overcome these drawbacks, it has long been the practice, when maximum security is required, to retrofit commercially available cabinets with security bars, which are sized to bridge across the cabinet closures and have their opposite ends secured to closure bounding portions of the cabinet frame by means of one or more padlocks, whose locked/unlocked condition is visually discernible without resort to manual inspection. For cases wherein less than all of the closures of any given cabinet are required to be afforded extra security, it has been normal practice to fit each closure to be afforded extra security, with a conventional hasp intended to be releasably secured to an associated frame mounted staple by means of a padlock; such hasps typically being similar in construction and mode of operation to hasps conventionally employed to secure diverse types of single swinging doors in closed condition relative to their associated door frames.